But wait, what’s this? Rather than a gentle slide towards Christmas, New Zealanders now have to endure no fewer than three northern hemisphere customs within a month that have little or no relevance here.
As soon as the words “trick or treat?” stop resonating throughout your suburb, the annoying crackles, crumps and bangs of fireworks take their place.
Then, just a few weeks later, we are suddenly assaulted by advertisements screaming at us “Black Friday sale” and sweet-talking us to buy more stuff we do not need.
At least Halloween and Guy Fawkes have their roots in history and are events which families and children can take part in and enjoy. But when did Black Friday become a New Zealand thing?
Now the witches’ hats and zombie masks are back in the cupboard, it is a good time to think about Halloween and what we get out of it.
The evening of October 31 has always offered children and parents a chance to dress up in the scariest, goriest costumes they can find before setting off around the local streets to “frighten” any unsuspecting, or pseudo-unsuspecting, person they come across.
But in recent years it has become increasingly Americanised. The attraction now seems to be more that it is a good chance to extort your neighbours, in the cutest possible kind of way, to hand over as many lollies as they have.
As long as there are willing participants to dish out “candy”, this seems to work well. But things can fall rather flat if you try offering a healthier snack instead — you’ll soon find out how popular you are with the neighbours’ kids. Or try saying “trick” when you are trick-and-treated, and see how little thought has gone into that side of things.
It requires adult supervision too, because of the huge contradiction set up by trick-and-treating. At any other time of the year, don’t we actively dissuade our children from taking lollies from strangers?
Guy Fawkes’ or Bonfire Night is similarly odd in a New Zealand context. There are probably not too many people these days burning effigies of guys on November 5, the focus instead being on the explosives which delight some, annoy many, and frighten our pets and other animals.
Fireworks can be fun. But the tradition does not translate well here because, unlike the United Kingdom where it is dark before 5pm at this time of year, you need to wait until close to 9pm to be able to see them.
As well as the obvious safety risks inherent in lighting crackers, roman candles and mighty cannons, the time of day they go off means broken sleep for some. And that can carry on for months after November 5, given people stock up on their fireworks during the short time they are on sale so they can detonate them at New Year’s Eve or to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
When it comes to Black Friday’s rapid emergence in the past few years, it really is just a cynical marketing ploy to fill a gap in the sales calendar a month before Christmas.
In the United States, Black Friday goes hand-in-hand with the Thanksgiving holiday the previous day. Ironically, of the Americanised occasions we do not have, Thanksgiving, with its focus on family and not presents, would be the best to adopt whole-heartedly, rather than Halloween or Black Friday.
New Zealand needs to be confident about its own public holidays and events. Halloween we might be stuck with, but let’s transfer fireworks to the new mid-winter Matariki holiday from 2022.
And while we are it, we need to ditch Black Friday. The lead-up to Christmas is quite commercial enough.
